this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2025
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Also people are fish. You can’t evolve out of your clade.
Hank Green went off about this recently. "Fish" just has no scientific meaning, and there are fish tetrapods.
I don't necessarily disagree, but ultimately there is a problem in classifying "fish" in the modern scientific taxonomy system - it has no good phylum to fit in as its a term that's a bit more broad than that, but not broad enough to make for a kingdom.
Sure, but isn’t the point that what we’d call ‘fish’ back when everything lived in the oceans, like pre-Devonian, the ancestors of all modern life?
We can’t out-evolve our clade, so all land animals are fish? And also we’re all amphibians, and everything directly leading to us? Insects, plants, and fungi are separate, but we’re technically fish?
Or am i misunderstanding that?
(e: if there are no ‘fish tetrapods’, where did tetrapods come from?)
Yeah, I'm not really arguing for or against the word fish technically fitting all land animals. I think that using it that way showcases the problem of trying to fit common terminology like "fish" into the scientific taxonomic system. The definition of fish has no use in that context.
Also, there are fish which are also arguably tetrapods https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarcopterygii
That’s fair. Honestly, all of taxonomy is just lines we draw, and all of evolution is really a fuzzy gradient. We can’t even figure out where the line for ‘human’ begins, because that’s also a meaningless term, really.
So the fact that we’re fish is as meaningful (or meaningless) as the fact that we’re human.
(And thanks for the link! That’s a cool, uh, ‘fish’.)
Yeah, this is the distinction I'm trying to draw between "common" and "scientific" terminology. Scientific taxonomy is based on evolutionary history, rather than just superficial traits like "has gills, fins, and lives mostly in water."